THE NEW MACHIAVELLI

6

I wanted political success now dearly enough, but not at the price

of constructive realities. These questions were no doubt

monstrously dangerous in the political world; there wasn't a

politician alive who didn't look scared at the mention of "The

Family," but if raising these issues were essential to the social

reconstructions on which my life was set, that did not matter. It

only implied that I should take them up with deliberate caution.

There was no release because of risk or difficulty.

The question of whether I should commit myself to some open project

in this direction was going on in my mind concurrently with my

speculations about a change of party, like bass and treble in a

complex piece of music. The two drew to a conclusion together. I

would not only go over to Imperialism, but I would attempt to

biologise Imperialism.

I thought at first that I was undertaking a monstrous uphill task.

But as I came to look into the possibilities of the matter, a strong

persuasion grew up in my mind that this panic fear of legislative

proposals affecting the family basis was excessive, that things were

much riper for development in this direction than old-experienced

people out of touch with the younger generation imagined, that to

phrase the thing in a parliamentary fashion, "something might be

done in the constituencies" with the Endowment of Motherhood

forthwith, provided only that it was made perfectly clear that

anything a sane person could possibly intend by "morality" was left

untouched by these proposals.

I went to work very carefully. I got Roper of the DAILY TELEPHONE

and Burkett of the DIAL to try over a silly-season discussion of

State Help for Mothers, and I put a series of articles on eugenics,

upon the fall in the birth-rate, and similar topics in the BLUE

WEEKLY, leading up to a tentative and generalised advocacy of the

public endowment of the nation's children. I was more and more

struck by the acceptance won by a sober and restrained presentation

of this suggestion.

And then, in the fourth year of the BLUE WEEKLY'S career, came the

Handitch election, and I was forced by the clamour of my antagonist,

and very willingly forced, to put my convictions to the test. I

returned triumphantly to Westminster with the Public Endowment of

Motherhood as part of my open profession and with the full approval

of the party press. Applauding benches of Imperialists cheered me

on my way to the table between the whips.

That second time I took the oath I was not one of a crowd of new

members, but salient, an event, a symbol of profound changes and new

purposes in the national life.

Here it is my political book comes to an end, and in a sense my book

ends altogether. For the rest is but to tell how I was swept out of

this great world of political possibilities. I close this Third

Book as I opened it, with an admission of difficulties and

complexities, but now with a pile of manuscript before me I have to

confess them unsurmounted and still entangled.

Yet my aim was a final simplicity. I have sought to show my growing

realisation that the essential quality of all political and social

effort is the development of a great race mind behind the interplay

of individual lives. That is the collective human reality, the

basis of morality, the purpose of devotion. To that our lives must

be given, from that will come the perpetual fresh release and

further ennoblement of individual lives…

I have wanted to make that idea of a collective mind play in this

book the part United Italy plays in Machiavelli's PRINCE. I have

called it the hinterland of reality, shown it accumulating a

dominating truth and rightness which must force men's now sporadic

motives more and more into a disciplined and understandingrelation

to a plan. And I have tried to indicate how I sought to serve this

great clarification of our confusions…

Now I come back to personality and the story of my self-betrayal,

and how it is I have had to leave all that far-reaching scheme of

mine, a mere project and beginning for other men to take or leave as

it pleases them.